Newcomer

The desperately need FFXIII in Japan asap. Althought FFXIII is important to the US market, the release is so far out. I don't think FFXIII is nearly as significant in Europe.

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The FF is quite popular here but I don't think that this will give the 360 what is needed to boost its sales in mainland Europe.

Their is also a matter of perception of the general public who doesn't follow gamingfora or watches E3. Some games have a mark as a "playstation game" and that is what some of the public will be buying even if its available on another platform. They are used to play it on the playstation.

It would be a big bombshell if it would come out anymore one the PS3.

Look what happened in some European countries with GTAIV. The lost of the exclusivity would also be so "devastating" for Sony.

ModeratorLegend

In Europe, it has the danger of backlashing for Microsoft. If the game ends up being four discs on 360 and 1 disc on PS3, for instance. But it could also end up being a boon for 360, if the game looks good on 360 which it has the potential to, seeing as this is yet another game developed on the PC first.

Veteran

I think there's a very good chance that SE will do realtime cutscenes. You can do 10+ hours of HD video that way and still not take up lots of space. The hardware is so powerful that it just makes sense.

There's no technical reason for animation quality or sound to be any different, and good coders will make graphics good enough for cut-scenes.

ModeratorLegend

The Japanese market may prefer CGI cut scenes though; certainly it's something I myself sort of expect from a Final Fantasy game. Granted they may very well go with the real-time cut scenes anyway, but just wanted to highlight that there may be a point of preference/marketability associated with it that goes beyond simple necessity.

ModeratorLegend

There also are no plans to have the games be different on Xbox 360 and PS3. Nothing has been decided for sure yet, but the team is looking at ways to compress the audio and pre-rendered cutscenes that take up a lot of data without affecting the quality when bringing the game from a blu-ray format to the DVDs that Xbox 360 reads.

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Are the CG scenes usually long? Maybe they can do a mix of CG and in-engine work...

ModeratorLegend

I was just going to say that there is very little chance that we won't have at least some big CGI cutscenes, as that's an FF staple, and they are usually FAR beyond what current consoles can manage (including some of the trailer stuff we've seen already).

I think there's certainly room for improving compression levels with different codecs, rates, and so on.

Scooby, as far as I remember, a lot of recent Final Fantasies offered you the ability to visit different areas you've been to already at leisure, to find secret items and monsters, replay certain 'mini' games, and so on. FFX-2 was even more extreme in that you had a lot of stuff you could do in different areas in whatever order you wanted. I'm not sure how FFXII is, as I didn't get too far into the game.

Regardless of that - 4 disc swapping in a 60 hour RPG doesn't have to be an issue, no, but it's still a matter of perception. It's been there already of course for two other big releases on the 360, but they were early in the game and weren't multi-platform. By the time FFXIII releases, which is, what, 2010, and it is released simultaneously with a lot of press, then it's going to bring the issue of space on a DVD vs BluRay (further) into the limelight. Never mind whether it is perfectly possible to play the game on 4 discs, it will show that the BluRay space is there for games, something which even games that currently use the BD quite strongly (like currently Uncharted and MGS4) won't achieve directly. People will see some great graphics, maybe, and a meaty game, and great sound, but they won't immediately think 'that's because of BluRay!'. In that sense, something like a high-profile multi-platform release is much more acute. I'm willing to bet that by this time Microsoft has worked something out with SE for partial HDD installation though.

Veteran

Are the CG scenes usually long? Maybe they can do a mix of CG and in-engine work...

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I take that quote as meaning "It's likely were going to have to lose quality on the compression of audio & CG cut-scene data"..

With the amount of epic CGI final fantasy games have these days It's practically impossible to do this otherwise..

(bar some ridiculous solution like stream-installing cgi for the game over the network onto the HDD..)

EDIT:

In answer to your question Arwin, they have done a mixture of cgi & in-engine cut-scenes traditionally; in-engine for the mundane "zidane has a word with other character"-type affairs & cgi for those high production value, epic scale "you couldn't do this kind of crazy shit in real-time" bits of the game..

What I DONT want to see happen with FFXIII is the developers deciding to cut-down the amount of epic cut-scene-ry if only to get the game to fit within the storage constraints of the 360s' DVDs, thus affecting both versions of the game..

They *did* say they're starting work on the 360 version later so hopefully this won't be the case..

Also what the ratio between storage capacity of Blu-Ray & DVDs..? realistically how many DVDs would be needed to compensate for a duel-layer PS3 SKU?
What about if they ended up having to ship FFXIII on 2 Blu-Ray discs? (not entirely impossible given some of the Blu-Ray usage stats of other, non-epic 60 hour long RPG titles..)

ModeratorLegend

If they do a 50GB BluRay game then without cutting down anything, but also without taking into account data you might want at any point in the game (such as the main characters and such):

I think we're looking at about 7 DVDs (one DVD holds space for about 7GB useable for games on the 360). It's probably at least the same as Lost Oddyssey on the 360, which was 4 discs, but who knows what brilliant form of compression they will come up with.

If I were Square, I would probably have started releasing an episodic content version of FF. That would have solved a lot of problems at once

Veteran

I take that quote as meaning "It's likely were going to have to lose quality on the compression of audio & CG cut-scene data"..

With the amount of epic CGI final fantasy games have these days It's practically impossible to do this otherwise..

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I think that's a given, but then again PS3 games usually come with mutliple language audio tracks and uncompressed PCM sound. I am sure they can save quite a few bytes here without impacting gameplay.
Same with using different video codecs and / or resolution (1080p->720p) etc. It won't have any negative effects on the gameplay.

Basically FFXIII will probably ship with 4 DVDs, they will manage just fine.

In an interview with Tetsuya Nomura, new details were released on Square Enix's upcoming titles Final Fantasy XIII and Versus XIII.

Noruma stated that with the help of the Blu-Ray and the HDD provided in every PS3, the quality jump from Final Fantasy XII to XIII should rival the jump seen in Final Fantasy VI to VII.

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Also, Noruma went on to say that once again Final Fantasy XIII and Versus XIII will be PlayStation 3 exclusives. This meaning that even though the White Engine is now multiplatform, gamers will not see these two titles going anywhere but the Sony PS3. Why you might ask? Well according to Noruma, Square Enix is using the PS3 to its full specifications, meaning that in order to perform the same game on PC or Xbox 360 would require a full reworking of the code and to run on the Xbox 360 would require probably a highly chopped down version or multiple disc version of the game.

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